Tag Archives: DX

DX hackfest 2016 aftermath

The DX hackfest, and FOSDEM, are over. Thanks everyone for coming — and thanks to betacowork, ICAB, the GNOME Foundation, and the various companies who allowed people to come along. Thanks to Collabora for sending me along and sponsoring snacks and dinner one evening.

What did we do?

GNOME programming guidelines: the rise of gnome-devel-docs

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Before I start, an addendum to my last post about the DX hackfest: I wish to thank Codethink for sponsoring dinner one night of the event. I forgot to include that in my original post, sorry! Thanks again to all the companies who let employees attend: Endless, Codethink, Canonical and Red Hat.

tl;dr: Check out the new GNOME Programming Guidelines and file bugs in Bugzilla. Though it looks like a cronjob may be taking the docs offline occasionally. This will be fixed.

Now, to some of the results of the hackfest. In the last week or so, I’ve been working on expanding the GNOME programming guidelines, upstreaming various bits of documentation which Collabora have been writing for a customer who is using the GNOME stack in a large project. The guidelines were originally written in the early days of GNOME by Federico, Miguel and Morten; Federico updated them in 2013, and now they’ve been expanded again.

It looks like these guidelines can fill one of the gaps we currently have in documentation, where we need to recommend best practices and give tutorial-style examples, but gtk-doc–generated API manuals are not the right place. For example, the new guidelines include recommendations for making libraries parallel-installable (based off Havoc’s original article, with permission); or recommendations for choosing where to store data (in GSettings, a serialised GVariant store, or a full-on GOM/SQLite database?). The guidelines are intended to be useful to all developers, although inherently need to target newer developers more, so may simplify a few things.

I’ve still got some ideas for things to add. For example, I need to rework some of my blog posts about GMainContext into an article, since we should be documenting before blogging. Other ideas are very welcome, as is criticism, feedback and improvements: please file a bug against gnome-devel-docs. Thanks to the documentation team for their help and reviews!

DX hackfest 2015: day 5

Day 5, and the DX and docs hackfest in Collabora HQ, Cambridge has drawn to a close. It’s been great to have everyone here, and there have been a lot of in-depth discussions over the last few days about the details of app sandboxing, runtimes, Builder integration with various new services, the development of an IDE abstraction layer, approaches for making build systems accessible to Builder, lots of new things to statically analyse, and some fairly fundamental additions to GLib in the form of G_DECLARE_[FINAL|DERIVABLE]_TYPE and general-purpose reference counted memory areas. Whew! We even had a fleeting visit by Richard Hughes to discuss packaging issues for apps.

For all the details, see the blogs by Ryan, Cosimo, Ryan again, Alberto, Christian and Emmanuele.

I can’t do justice to the work of the docs team, who put in consistent, solid effort throughout the hackfest. See the blogs by Petr, Bastian, Kat and Jim for all the details. They even left me with a seemingly endless supply of Mallard balls to throw around the office!

Dave and I have spent a little while working on further deprecating gnome-common. More details to come once the migration guide is finished.

Thank you to Collabora for hosting, Codethink for sponsoring a dinner, and Endless, Codethink (again), Canonical and Red Hat for letting people attend; and thank you to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring some of the attendees. It would not be a hackfest without the hackers!

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